Martin Amis's idiosyncratic, difficult and often brilliant study of communism and Stalin (childhood nickname - Koba) takes as its starting point a single paradox: 'It has always been possible to joke about the Soviet Union, just as it has never been possible to joke about Nazi Germany.' The jokers he's referring to are the denizens of London's literary and socialist circles, friends of his and his late father's, several of whom he addresses directly in the text, because Koba the Dread is also, in part, a memoir dealing with the deaths of his father and sister.

As he admits, this makes for an odd mixture, but Amis sets about his task of awakening the reader to the almost unbearable horror, and innate unfunniness, of Stalin's regime with great originality. The most startling passages are those in which he allows his frustration and anger at his own bereavements to leak into his castigation of Stalin - when he begins to take the dictator's crimes personally.

Wegener's JigsawClare DudmanSceptre £7.99, pp405

Alfred Wegener's jigsaw was the surface of the Earth itself. In 1906, while calculating his position on the first of his three heroic exploratory expeditions across Greenland, Wegener realised that the ground beneath him was slowly migrating westwards. Extrapolating his ideas from the behaviour of icebergs, he explained the phenomenon by suggesting that the Earth's crust is divided into continental islands (the pieces of a fragmented, ancient supercontinent), which drift on a molten layer beneath. Fifty years later, his theory was revived and became the basis of plate tectonics. The blinkered scientific community of the time dismissed it out of hand.

Clare Dudman's enchanting fictionalised account of his life is narrated by Wegener himself. She has derived his earnest, introverted voice from the tone of his surviving journals, and we follow him through the horrors of the Great War and the less dangerous sniping and entrenchment of the scientific world, and out on to the pack ice, where he most belonged.

Editor: An Inside Story of NewspapersMax HastingsPan £7.99, pp405

As the first journalist into Port Stanley during the Falklands conflict, Max Hastings must have developed a taste for rushing into hazardous situations. Taking on the editorship of the Telegraph was, it seems from this enjoyable, gung-ho book, another example of that. When Hastings arrived, the paper's hefty readership figures were in freefall, and the staff and offices in a state of antiquated confusion. Security in the building was so lax that when he arrived at the doorway to his office one morning, he found a tramp sleeping there: 'He protested vociferously against eviction, asserting that he had been dossing there for months without interference.' Having edited the paper for 10 years, he has some fine stories to tell. His main concern in this gossipy but authoritative book, however, is to give some idea of the trials an editor must undergo, and the tactics he must employ in order to last as long as the author did.